Episcopal Church

A majority of dioceses in the Episcopal Church have confirmed the election of an open lesbian as a bishop in Los Angeles, bringing her one step closer to consecration. The Diocese of Los Angeles, where Mary Glasspool was elected as an assistant bishop three months earlier, announced confirmations from 61 of the denomination’s 110 dioceses on March 10.

When my daughter became a teenager, she was invited to serve as an acolyte at our Episcopal church. I thought it would be a wonderful thing to do with her. With her permission, I became an acolyte too—in my mid-forties.

Since becoming the first lesbian to be elected a bishop in the Epis copal Church, Mary Glasspool has been hailed as a gay rights pioneer and maligned as the straw that will finally break the back of the Anglican Com munion.

Seminary professor Ian T. Douglas, a member of the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council and a representative on the global Anglican Consultative Council, has been elected bishop of the Diocese of Connecticut. Douglas, 51, who holds an endowed chair in mission and world Christianity at Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was elected on the second ballot on October 24.

Although many ex-Episcopalians in the U.S. identify with Catholic rules against ordaining women and noncelibate gays to the priesthood, the traditionalists heading their own rival Anglican organizations in North America say that few followers are likely to become Roman Catholics.

On the opening day of the U.S. Supreme Court’s fall term, the high court announced that it will not intervene in two prominent church-state cases, one involving a Catholic diocese in Con necticut and the other a former Epis copal parish in southern California.

Ten Maryland nuns—almost an entire religious community—converted from the Episcopal Church to Catholicism on September 3, saying that their former denomination had become too liberal in its acceptance of homosexuality.

Two Episcopal dioceses have nominated gay and lesbian priests in same-sex relationships to become bishops, testing a weeks-old policy and the Episcopal Church’s place within the global Anglican Communion.